"Filmmakers have drawn inspiration from the pages of Emile Zola from the earliest days of cinema. The ever-growing number of adaptations they have produced spans eras, genres, languages, and styles. In spite of the diversity of these approaches, numerous critics regard them as inferior copies of a superior textual original. But key novels by Zola resist this critical approach to adaptation. Both at the level of characterization and in terms of their own textual inheritance, they question the very possibility of origin, be it personal or textual. In the light of this questioning, the cinematic versions created from Zolas texts merit critical re-evaluation. Far from being facile copies of the nineteenth-century novelists works, these films assess their own status as adaptations, playing with both notions of artistic creation and their own artistic act. Kate Griffiths is a lecturer in French at Swansea University."

Émile Zola (1840-1902) has become one of the most adapted authors of all time, but while much has been made of his adaptation into cinema and theatre, television has largely been overlooked. Yet television, with its serial structures and popular reach, is uniquely suited to the adaptation of a novelist who eagerly reworked his writing for the broadest audiences possible. It is not for nothing that broadcasters such as the BBC return to Zola so often - most recently with The Paradise (2012). In older productions, particularly, sweeping panoramas disappear, to be replaced by the boxy interior shots of studio-produced pieces heavy with dialogue. But television fulfils Zola's intention to provide, in close-up, a dissection of the characters' entrapment as they struggle beneath the weight of their heredity, era and environment. The passage from book to television is also the passage from a single author to a collective one, in a process which challenges many of the simple binaries which have dominated and limited key debates in the history of adaptation. Different identities commission, fund, write, direct and produce programmes which are then shown and re-shown in different contexts, forms, times and media packages. This volume brings translation theory into dialogue with adaptation studies to open new debates. It does so in relation to an author of key import to adaptation studies. Zola and the myriad television adaptations of his work ask us to reconsider the boundaries of authorship, adaptation and the artistic artefact. Kate Griffiths is Professor of French and Translation Studies at Cardiff University.

French novelist Emile Zola, noted for his championship of the Naturalist novel, has been one of the most adapted authors in world literature. There have been approximately 80 film adaptations of his late 19th century novels and short stories, many of which occurred during the silent era of international film production (1895-1927). While the aesthetic elements of Zola's fiction continue to appeal to international cinema, the author's thematic naturalism and his "scientific methodology" have provided an ideological framework that incorporates art, science and history into the many cinematic adaptations of his work. This collection of essays, contributed by scholars of French literature and film, explores the dynamic relationship between Zola's fiction and its film adaptations, examining critically significant cinematic adaptations of Zola's novels from a variety of theoretical and interdisciplinary perspectives. The 13 essays discuss the adaptation of Zola's works within the limitations of the silent cinema; the challenges posed by film censorship and the notoriety of the author's naturalist text; the ideological inflection given to Zola's working class narratives; and Zola's representation of women. Zola's works are placed within their respective historical contexts, as the essays address encoded anti-Nazi sentiment in films produced under the German occupation of France during World War II and the French Communist Party's reception of the filmic adaptation of Germinal. Other adapted works addressed in these chapters include La Terre, Nana, La Bete humaine, Au Bonheur des Dames, Therese Raquin, Gervaise and Pot-Bouille.

Filmmakers have drawn inspiration from the pages of Emile Zola from the earliest days of cinema. The ever-growing number of adaptations they have produced spans eras, genres, languages, and styles. In spite of the diversity of these approaches, numerous critics regard them as inferior copies of a superior textual original. But key novels by Zola resist this critical approach to adaptation. Both at the level of characterization and in terms of their own textual inheritance, they question the very possibility of origin, be it personal or textual. In the light of this questioning, the cinematic versions created from Zola's texts merit critical re-evaluation. Far from being facile copies of the nineteenth-century novelist's works, these films assess their own status as adaptations, playing with both notions of artistic creation and their own artistic act.

Adapting Nineteenth-Century France uses the output of six canonical novelists and their recreations in a variety of media to push for a re-conceptualisation of our approach to the study of adaptation. The works of Balzac, Hugo, Flaubert, Zola, Maupassant and Verne reveal themselves not as originals to be defended from adapting hands, but fashioned from the adapted voices of a host of earlier artists, moments and media. The text analyses re-workings of key nineteenth-century texts across time and media in order to underline the way in which such re-workings cast new light on many of their source texts and reveal the probing analysis nineteenth-century novelists undertake in relation to notions of originality and authorial borrowing. Moreover, Adapting Nineteeth-Century France traces their subsequent recreations in a comparable range of genres, encompassing key modern media of the twentieth- and twenty-first-centuries: radio, silent film, fiction, musical theatre, sound film and television.

Émile Zola was the leader of the literary movement known as 'naturalism' and is one of the great figures of the novel. In his monumental Les Rougon-Macquart (1871-93), he explored the social and cultural landscape of the late nineteenth century in ways that scandalized bourgeois society. Zola opened the novel up to a new realm of subjects, including the realities of working-class life, class relations, and questions of gender and sexuality, and his writing embodied a new freedom of expression, with his bold, outspoken voice often inviting controversy. In this Very Short Introduction, Brian Nelson examines Zola's major themes and narrative art. He illuminates the social and political contexts of Zola's work, and provides readings of five individual novels (The Belly of Paris, L'Assommoir, The Ladies' Paradise, Germinal, and Earth). Zola's naturalist theories, which attempted to align literature with science, helped to generate the stereotypical notion that his fiction was somehow nonfictional. Nelson, however, reveals how the most distinctive elements of Zola's writing go far beyond his theoretical naturalism, giving his novels their unique force. Throughout, he sets Zola's work in context, considering his relations with contemporary painters, his role in the Dreyfus Affair, and his eventual murder. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.